LinkWithin

Thursday, November 3, 2011

A Few Firsts

When we arrived in Europe on Saturday morning, Shawn picked us up from the airport. He already had our first outing planned: picking up my car.

”You mean I have to drive? Now? Here?” ”Yes, yes and yes. The sooner you start, the easier it will be,” he said.

So we picked up my new (to me) car and I drove it almost 45 minutes to our house. My sweet husband, bless his heart, searched high and low to find me an automatic. You see, I don’t know how to drive stick. And Europeans? Well, they like their stick shifts. So an automatic is hard to come by.

I panicked a little, as one does when driving for the first time in a foreign country. Then I saw this and panicked a little more.

Because 70 miles per hour is awfully fast for this foreigner to be driving. Oh, wait. That’s kilometers. So that’s like… I actually have no idea how many miles per hour that is. I’m not very good at the metric system.

Wednesday, Shawn went back to work for the first time since Hannah and I have been here. We got up and headed out early. Ok, it was 11AM. But that’s 5AM where we come from.

We thought we’d check out a few local grocery stores. In European grocery stores, all the shopping carts are at the entrance to the store and you put a coin in to unlock it. You get your coin back when you return it. Genius. Everyone returns their carts to the entrance of the store so there are no carts in the parking lot. No carts in the parking lot equals no dings on your car. Genius.

We picked up a few items and headed back to our little town. To complicate things further, the name of our town can be pronounced in German and Luxembourgish.

When Shawn got home from work, he said that he had a meeting early the next day in Brussels and it made sense for him to go there now instead of in the morning and would we like to come along? I wasn’t totally up for staying in a strange house in a different country all alone and I’ve been living out of a suitcase for the last five weeks, so what’s one more night? (Have you ever packed a suitcase from another suitcase that hasn’t yet been unpacked?)

Hannah and I stayed at the hotel while Shawn went to his meeting early the next morning. And we both slept the sleep of angels. It was dreamy.

Shawn picked us up after his meeting and we drove back to Luxembourg. And by we, I mean I. Shawn took this pic as proof.

Doesn’t the blurry background make it look like I was going really fast? Wow. I must have been driving A LOT OF KILOMETERS PER HOUR. Don’t be fooled. I got passed and honked at more than once.

On the way home, we made a stop at IKEA. (It was open this time.)

We picked up a few things and decided to eat while we were there.

We really tried to blend in with the Europeans. But while we were eating Hannah yelled out, “Mom, do the French people know I’m four?”